The mountain macros do indeed have "wrong" bases. However, that's intentional and done in order to make them layer better with their surroundings; at least forests and units. Using the correct base values results in the regular mountains getting drawn on top of forests and units to the nw-n-ne, which looks awful in many cases. Unfortunately, it does also cause the mountains to layer slightly wrong WRT each other.

Basically, if the bases are right then the mountains will layer correctly with each other but poorly with other adjacent things, and if they're wrong then the mountains will have some layering glitches with each other but will layer correctly with other adjacent things. Your mountains don't suffer from the former, because their perspective is slightly different and the parts which will cover for example nw-n-ne forests are peaks and cliffs, not slopes like for example in the regular 4x2 mountains. However, especially your extra peaks seem to excessively cover units right behind them, completely obscuring for example a Goblin Spearman.

I can't really say yet whether and how we could have mountains work correctly in all cases, but until I figure that out, I'm inclined to put your mountains in using the stock macros and leaving out the extra peaks for now.

Well, that doesn't sound good. Maybe something similar to the extra peaks can still be applied to situations when no one can get behind them, like a big patch in front of impassable mountains, or a cave wall.
The cave wall-mountains interface in general isn't very good, seems like there must be some sort of opportunity for something there.

As said, I did omit the overlay peaks for the aforementioned reasons. We could add them as long as the issues can be taken care of one way or another, but I'd rather like to avoid that kind of an exceptional hack altogether if possible. For example, couldn't we simply have a few more simple variations of the existing mountain ranges to provide the extra variety? I'd imagine that those should be easy to make by just incorporating some of the overlay peaks into them by hand, and if necessary, I can write some new macros if a mountain range actually needs to be of a slightly different shape. It doesn't look at all too monotonous to me even without the peaks, and to elevate it further shouldn't take more than adding a 2x4 SW-NE and maybe a third 2x2, with some tweaking of the probabilities.

Omitting the peaks allowed me to just use the stock mountain macros, and I also changed the impassable version to use Xm as the overlay code like the other impassable mountains. I also kept the dry mountains instead of replacing them with this, because they do look completely different and are actually useful as-is in some places.

***

On a related note, working on this led me to do another layering change first. This was basically to fix a problem at the expense of introducing another, so I'm not sure if we'll end up keeping it. As I said earlier, some of the regular mountains are drawn from such an angle that you can see the slopes behind the mountain, and it looks bad when those slopes were drawn on top of forests behind them, and also the mountains were simply being layered slightly wrong WRT each other, leading to some hard hex edges between them.

So, I changed the layering so that the forests get drawn on top of the slopes when possible and only behind the actual main peaks, and fixed almost all cases of mountain-mountain edges. Which looks better in most cases with the regular mountains, but it also means that in some situations some trees get inappropriately drawn on top of your mountains. However, I don't think it actually looks particularly bad, especially considering how rarely you'd have trees next to desert mountains, so I felt it was an acceptable tradeoff.

Again, I'm not completely sure about this and maybe I'll end up reverting it eventually (especially if everyone hates it).

zookeeper wrote: For example, couldn't we simply have a few more simple variations of the existing mountain ranges to provide the extra variety? I'd imagine that those should be easy to make by just incorporating some of the overlay peaks into them by hand, and if necessary, I can write some new macros if a mountain range actually needs to be of a slightly different shape.

That's one way to go, but the advantage of providing a separate layer is that you essentially multiply the number of apparent mountains (well, sort of), whereas new variations are just simple addition, and with the good ol' RNG (or whatever determines the probabilities & variations) we're sure to get clumps of identical images.

But if the images are done right, there should be nothing so eye-catching that the clone-clumps are too obvious. So if you want to go with the basic mountain macro plan, I can work with that and make adjustments/variations.

zookeeper wrote:As I said earlier, some of the regular mountains are drawn from such an angle that you can see the slopes behind the mountain, and it looks bad when those slopes were drawn on top of forests behind them, and also the mountains were simply being layered slightly wrong WRT each other, leading to some hard hex edges between them.

My failure to follow the basic mountain perspective was not entirely based in cluelessness; I didn't understand or enjoy the basic mountain design[*]. If needed, I could (try to) adjust the current mountain graphics so they were lower perspective.

* - I'm not trash talking. Wesnoth terrain graphics require many different & conflicting considerations, and the current basic mountains are good. My mind would emphasize different considerations is all.

doofus-01 wrote:That's one way to go, but the advantage of providing a separate layer is that you essentially multiply the number of apparent mountains (well, sort of), whereas new variations are just simple addition, and with the good ol' RNG (or whatever determines the probabilities & variations) we're sure to get clumps of identical images.

But if the images are done right, there should be nothing so eye-catching that the clone-clumps are too obvious. So if you want to go with the basic mountain macro plan, I can work with that and make adjustments/variations.

Yeah, that'd be great. As said, I don't think it really needs a lot of new ones, just a few more should do the trick. Avoiding adjacent clumps is something that I think could just be added into the stock macros if it's needed.

zookeeper wrote:My failure to follow the basic mountain perspective was not entirely based in cluelessness; I didn't understand or enjoy the basic mountain design[*]. If needed, I could (try to) adjust the current mountain graphics so they were lower perspective.

I think ideally that's what would be done; to lower the perspective of the regular mountains so that the slopes on the back side wouldn't be visible, so the peaks could just be drawn on top of whatever is behind them. However, that seems like it'd require a lot of redrawing so I don't know how realistic it is.

Here are a few more. In principle, the pieces could be mixed with the ones already in, but simply using variations=;b in all the little images tags keeps them all in sync, so the dry_range3_*.png and dry_range3b_*.png are just two variations instead of eight. If there is a way around that, the images should be OK for it.

Well, I can put those in, but they're very subtle variations. At least in 1b and 3b I can't really tell at a quick glance what the difference between them and the original is; of course I can if I actually start comparing them, but without closer examination they very much register as the same pattern. I could try and see if I can incorporate a few bigger changes from some of the high* images or something to change at least one major feature in each one.

I've made some revisions and slight variations that I think are an improvement, making the mountains less muddy.
Here is a screenshot. I will post the PR link here in a few minutes.
EDIT: PR link -> https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth/pull/1851